CHAPTER XSomething incredibly bright and shining seemed to rise up directly in Jim Lawrence’s path and hover for an instant before his dazzled vision. Then it swept down upon him, enveloping him in a steady, gentle warmth, irradiating him from head to foot. The sensation would have been a comforting withdrawal of all tension from his body, a radiant enfoldment no more harsh than a caressing wind if it had not robbed him at the same instant of all capacity to feel.
For a very long time Jim Lawrence felt nothing at all. And with the departure of all sensation from his mind and body his human awareness flickered and went out. The cells of his brain suffered no damage, but they ceased to transmit thought impulses from nerve ganglion to nerve ganglion, and he did not even dream.
He remembered
